


Verisimilitude

by thedevilchicken



Category: The Following
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - College/University, Canon-Typical Violence, Guns, Knifeplay, Knives, M/M, Murder Husbands, Sexual Content, Twisted and Fluffy Feelings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-24
Updated: 2015-10-24
Packaged: 2018-04-27 21:11:38
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5064310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Their first meeting was like something out of a bad romantic comedy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Verisimilitude

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reeby10](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reeby10/gifts).



Their first meeting was like something out of a bad romantic comedy, Joe thinks and Joe found himself thinking sometime after the fact, though he couldn’t say he thought it at the time. 

A month into the autumn semester there at Winslow he walked into the best and the busiest - the two things were not entirely unrelated - coffee shop on campus as another patron was walking out and suddenly, quite unexpectedly, he found himself wearing that other patron’s coffee all over his favourite jacket. This didn’t seem particularly fortuitous at the time. It seemed irritating and exasperating and most of all it seemed _hot_ in the most unpleasant of ways. 

“Aw, man, I’m sorry,” the fellow said, tossing his half-emptied cup into a bin conveniently stationed just a few feet away; Joe set down his briefcase on the bench there outside the coffee shop’s front window and then he pulled off his jacket. His shirt was soaked through beneath it, too, down to his skin, though he supposed at least it had only managed to penetrate a roughly four-inch circle there over his stomach, mercifully well north of the belted waist of his trousers. Naturally, the guilty party produced a packet of tissues from his backpack and started dabbing ineffectually at the sopping coffee stain because the moment wouldn’t have been complete in all its semi-comedic glory without the attempt. Joe waved him off.

“Look, it’s not the end of the world,” Joe told him, though he cast a rather forlorn look over his likely ruined jacket as he said so. At least, he thought, the inevitable conversation with his dry cleaner ought to be entertaining. “I keep a change of clothes in my office in case of such little emergencies. They happen more often than you might think.” And he folded his damp jacket over his arm, picked up his briefcase and decided that coffee would have to wait if he wanted to change before the start of his lecture; the beverages brewed by the vending machine in the English department weren’t exactly noted for their wholesome or full-bodied flavour but it would, at least, be hot and caffeinated, and so it wouldn’t have to wait for long. 

He turned to leave but the coffee-spilling maniac caught his arm and Joe turned back with an inquisitive frown, first at the hand still lingering there warmly at his forearm over his shirt and then at the man himself. The smile the fellow gave him was what really caught his attention that morning, even more so than the hot splash of coffee or the hand on his arm; it was apologetic and very nearly hesitant but faintly amused underneath, the effect charming all-in-all and Joe supposed it was aimed to charm _him_ , but it barely reached his eyes at all. And not just, Joe suspected, because he’d already been drinking by the rather early pre-class hour of 8.45am. 

“Hey, at least let me buy you a coffee,” he said, and Joe returned that smile with a particularly charming one of his own, the one he usually reserved for the prettier ladies who came into the office after his lectures or who gathered around the lectern as he put away his papers after finishing a class. 

“A rain check, perhaps,” he said. “I should change before I teach if I don’t want rumours to abound that I’ve suffered the wrath of a vengeful barista.” 

The ‘vengeful barista’ in question nodded, his smile failing just a fraction, perhaps calculated though he couldn’t be certain, and Joe turned to exit stage right toward his office. But then he paused for a moment and turned back again.

“Don’t think I won’t call on that rain check,” Joe said. “I take my coffee very seriously.” And the smile brightened once again.

Joe didn’t ask who he was before he left, didn’t ask for his name or ask if he’d be seeing him again at all because they’d both been there at the coffee shop at the same time every morning since the start of the semester. Joe had noticed him flirting with the pretty blonde barista who was, by all rights, far too young for either of them. He’d watched him standing there in the jostling, caffeine-starved throng awaiting the arrival of his order while he toyed with his phone or read a book as he leant nonchalant against the wall. They’d spotted each other more than once around campus, too, in the courtyard by the library, on the way to the quieter car park by the chemistry labs. The name on his cup had always said _Ryan_ , except for the odd occasion when the harried staff misheard and scribbled down _Bryan_. He didn’t look like a Bryan, Joe thought. He was definitely a Ryan. 

He knew he’d be seeing him again. He’d only have to wait for the next morning, and he might even look forward to it.

\---

The wait, as it turned out, wasn’t even as long as that. 

Joe delivered his lecture that morning to a hall full of the usual avid listeners and then retired to his office for an utterly devastating three-hour block of postgraduate tutorials and _then_ , just as he’d started to give up hope that he’d make it through the rest of the afternoon without the pressing need for some kind of immoral distraction or the advent of lunacy, there was a knock on his door. He didn’t expect that this boded particularly well, of course, but being a very good, exceptionally respectable member of Winslow University English faculty he called, “Come in.” He sounded much more enthusiastic than he felt, he thought. He’d have made a very good actor.

“Hey,” said the nefarious coffee-spilling villain as he appeared in the doorway. He stepped inside, closed the door behind him with his heel and held up a cardboard coffee cup in each hand. “I figured if you’re anything like me you could use a caffeine fix right about now. And I was passing by, so…” He shrugged and Joe sat back in his desk chair with a smile that was apparently taken as an invitation to bring the coffee across the room and set it on Joe’s desk. He supposed it had been.

“That’s very much appreciated,” Joe said, picking up the cup and holding it up with a nod quite like a toast, a gesture that was returned. “Take a seat. It’s Ryan, yes?”

Ryan leaned over the desk and held out his hand and Joe took it, shook it firmly. “Yeah, it’s Ryan,” he said, with a quick, forlorn glance at the hastily-scribbled _Brian_ on the side of his own coffee cup. Apparently the afternoon barista had made the usual mistake. “Ryan Hardy. Pleased to meet you, now you’re not wearing my latte.” 

“Joe Carroll,” Joe replied. “Though I suppose you must already know that, considering the fact that you’ve found your way to my office.”

Ryan shrugged, gave him a lopsided grin as he sat down in the chair across the desk and then took a sip of his coffee. He practically sprawled, making himself very clearly at home, which Joe found amusing for reasons he didn’t bother to place for the moment. “The name on the door was a dead giveaway,” he said. “Seriously, everyone on campus knows who you are, Joe. Can I call you Joe?”

Joe gave an expansive gesture of his arms, coffee still in hand. “By all means,” he said. “I suppose I have something of a reputation.” Then took a sip and looked at him over the plastic lid of his cup. “Now, why don’t you tell me why you’re really here?”

To his credit, Ryan didn’t try to pretend he didn’t have an ulterior motive, at least not beyond a brief and highly unconvincing initial protestation; he smiled that same unusual smile and he ran a hand over his artistically messy hair as he sat there with almost comically wide-spread legs and he told him he was a Psych grad student and wanted to get his opinion on something for a really tangentially related article he was working on. It made sense in an odd way because it seemed Ryan had veered into the realm of the ever so slightly literary in this particular article and Joe’s name had come up in a conversation with his supervisor, a rather lovely lady who had something of the unfortunate infatuation. Not that Joe could say he blamed her entirely as he might have led her on just a fraction, just a tad, every now and then. He had a tendency to do that. He found it hard to help himself.

“I can’t honestly say I’m looking for another student at the moment, Ryan,” Joe said, watching him closely. 

Ryan shrugged broadly. “And I’m not looking for a supervisor, Joe,” he replied. “I just wanna spitball a little, y’know? See what sticks.”

Then Ryan smiled that smile again, all boyish charm in spite of the fact that he couldn’t have possibly been younger than Joe was himself and was possibly even a little older. Joe allowed himself to be charmed by it or at least by that strange flaw, the sliver of flat insincerity to it that spoke volumes, though just what it spoke volumes about was still quite the little mystery. Joe found he wanted to unravel it. He was intrigued. 

“Bring me another coffee at the same time tomorrow and we’ll speak then,” Joe said. 

“And next time I’ll be careful where I _put_ the coffee,” Ryan said, then he stood and he dropped his empty cardboard cup into the bin and he made for the door, turned back as he got there. “You won’t regret it,” he added, and then he left.

Joe watched him leave. He recalls wondering if that final statement would prove true or not. He recalls suspecting it wouldn’t but hoping that it would.

\---

They met again the next day and the day after that in Joe’s office at the exact same time, skipped the weekend for reasons of work-related propriety and then reconvened on Monday. Ryan was never late and he always brought coffee; just over a fortnight later and he was still coming by though their speculative conversation on Poe’s mental health had long since been concluded. Joe didn’t tell him to stop coming and Ryan didn’t suggest that he would. The continuation seemed oddly natural. It wasn’t questioned. 

By the end of the first month, Joe realised he’d had entire relationships that had lasted far less time than this and Ryan was _still_ coming into the English building each and every weekday afternoon with two cups of coffee and they’d sit there for at least an hour and often longer, until after dark sometimes, until the security staff came by and apologised for interrupting them as they checked to see windows were closed and doors were locked. But by that point things were starting to feel just a little easy and simple and complacent; basically, Joe hadn’t found out Ryan’s dirty little secret. He hadn’t found his way any closer to it at all and frustratingly he was letting it cut into his other extracurricular activities. It was cutting into them quite deeply, though Joe found to his surprise that it didn’t bother him near as much as he’d thought it would. Ryan Hardy was more than enough to hold his interest.

Ryan had worked for the FBI, he said, and for the first five weeks he didn’t say why he’d left, didn’t even discuss what he’d done while he was there, and Joe didn’t push. Then one afternoon he dropped his coffee cup onto the office floor and he grimaced and set his jaw as the coffee spilled; after forty, fifty seconds of Joe watching him intently across the desk and Ryan waving off both his concern and his offers to dial 911 or at least locate a willing first-aider, he explained he’d been shot on the job and though he’d obviously survived and was usually more or less symptom-free, he had occasional reminders of the fact. He had a pacemaker, he said, looking irritated by the whole affair, and as he stood and went to leave the room after his reluctant, forced admission, Joe rose and stopped him by the door. 

He rested his hand against Ryan’s chest and felt for the telltale bump under the skin where the pacemaker sat, through the fabric of his t-shirt. Ryan just raised his brows and let him do it as they stood there just a shade too close to one another in Joe’s office doorway, out of hours and almost certainly alone. Joe took a half-step closer, pushing, wondering how far he could take it before Ryan balked; the faint smile Joe was sure was only there to make light of the situation then departed Ryan’s face but he didn’t move and he didn’t look away. He certainly didn’t leave. But Joe stopped pushing; that was enough for one day, he thought. He wanted to push him, but not push him away. And perhaps he needed a moment himself. Perhaps he needed it more than Ryan did. 

They were there again the following afternoon, sitting on the semi-comfortable chairs stationed at Joe’s worn old wooden office coffee table. They were there again the day after that, going through the new article Ryan was getting ready for submission; it wasn’t Joe’s area of expertise but he could offer advice on the writing style, at least, and the logic of his arguments that all seemed quite concise and well-structured, probably an artefact of report-writing for the FBI. They were there the day after that, too, Joe pushing the limits just a little further each and every time: a hand on Ryan’s shoulder as they left for the night, a palm at his hip as he read over his shoulder. Joe helped him into his jacket. Joe patted Ryan’s thigh to emphasise a point. He sat so close their shoulders and elbows and knees all touched as they read through a paper and Ryan barely flinched. Joe decided he’d just have to try harder.

“How would you feel about lunch tomorrow?” Joe asked one evening, one _Friday_ evening, seemingly offhand about it. 

“Yeah, my niece is down from New York,” Ryan replied, with an apologetic smile but Joe could see his mind working the idea through, the prospect of their reasonably working relationship taking a detour outside the reasonable bounds of campus. “Rain check?” 

“I didn’t know you had a niece,” Joe said in response to that, and so Ryan told him about his niece and his sister, and then he told him about his brother, and _then_ he told him about his father and the expression on his face was so flat and calm and lacking any real emotion that Joe could only speculate on what was hiding there beneath it. Ryan didn’t lack emotion, not really; if anything, he had an excess of it. He was sublimating. Joe was fascinated. 

“She’s flying home sometime after noon,” Ryan said. “You wanna grab some dinner instead?” And he looked so unsure as he said it, at the suggestion of taking their little discussion group out of work hours or at least out of weekdays, that Joe almost said no just to see his reaction. 

“Shall we meet here at seven?” he said instead. 

“Sounds good,” Ryan said. “I’ll see you then.” Then he smiled, and there was a flicker of something in it that Joe had never seen there before. It was thrilling. It gave him literal goosebumps.

He could almost have forgotten that he hadn’t killed anyone in weeks. 

\---

Dinner on Saturday night led to a lunch on Sunday afternoon then sad cafeteria sandwiches on Monday at lunchtime instead of waiting until their usual hour, and then they had dinner again on Wednesday. 

They skipped their usual coffee and chit-chat that day and met at the restaurant; Joe hadn’t seen Ryan in a suit before that night but he wore it just the way an FBI agent would, he thought, not like a mature grad student. Joe could almost imagine the sidearm and the shiny gold badge at his belt. He wondered if Ryan felt their absence. He wondered if he missed the work, or anything else.

“I haven’t worn one of these since I left the Bureau,” Ryan said, smoothing down his jacket as he settled at the table and Joe chuckled good-naturedly, or at least he made a very good approximation of what he supposed good-natured sounded like. He wasn’t exactly on intimate terms with any form of good nature, after all. What he did in that direction was mimicry.

“Well, I’m gratified that you took the suit out of mothballs for me, Ryan,” Joe said, teasing, and they ordered a bottle of wine. 

They were there longer than they should have been, drank more than they should have drunk and left together afterwards, took a taxi together because while Joe was sure neither of them would have had too much in the way of trouble negotiating the very straight and not so very long road back to his house, he was likewise sure that Ryan’s curtailed if still successful career with the FBI didn’t require a sad appendix of drink-driving convictions. Joe invited him in and so Ryan went in; they sat in the living room and Joe poured them each a whisky, handed Ryan a glass that he eyed for a moment before taking a sip. 

“You have a great place,” Ryan said, lounging at the opposite end of the couch as he looked around the room. “And the scotch is pretty good, too.”

“It’s _very_ good, in point of fact,” Joe said, raising his glass. “Though I suspect you prefer vodka, Ryan.” 

After a moment, Ryan shrugged and Joe didn’t push and didn’t disapprove. The fact that Ryan obviously knew he didn’t know when to stop but drank anyway was interesting if not unexpected and it most definitely was not the deep, dark secret Joe so dearly wished to dig his way down to like a strange kind of mental archaeology. The important part was, of course, for Ryan to know that Joe knew he had a problem and he didn’t judge him by it. The strangest part of it for Joe was he found that was actually true.

An hour later, perhaps a little more, and the two of them were quite drunk enough for one evening; Joe showed Ryan upstairs to the guest bedroom and Ryan thanked him and then turned away. They were both standing in the doorway, too close together for it to be completely comfortable, too close together for it to really be an accident though Joe supposes it could have been played away as one. But Joe stood his ground - it was his home, after all - and Ryan swallowed, his Adam’s apple taking a slow bob as they stood there in the half-light, half-reeling. 

They didn’t kiss, but it was a close-run thing. Joe wouldn’t have liked to bet on it and then he lay awake in bed, bemused that he hadn’t just done it, amused to find that he’d wanted it. That was unexpected. It was an interesting turn. It was a turn- _on_ , apparently, enough that in his pleasant alcoholic haze Joe fell asleep half-hard with a vague wish that it were Ryan’s hand around his cock and not his own. 

When they did kiss, it was a week or so later, into the Christmas holiday and Joe invited Ryan over for dinner once classes were finished for the brief winter hiatus, served steak and wine and some sort of chocolatey dessert that was so sweet it was almost cloying and as Joe cleared away the plates Ryan came with him into the kitchen. They weren’t nearly as drunk as they could have been that night when Ryan stepped in behind him at the sink with a rather sharp steak knife in one hand; Joe could see his reflection in the window above the sink, could see the way Ryan’s eyes reflected in the glass and there was a moment then, a ridiculous, over-bloated moment of dreadful certainty in which Joe actually believed Ryan would reach up, reach forward and draw that knife across his throat. It was right there inside his head, how he’d clamp his hand down but the blood would pump out past it, down over his dark shirt to make it darker. Joe almost wanted him to try it, felt something tighten up inside him in delicious anticipation at the thought of it, of how he’d fight him back and maybe one of them wouldn’t make it out of the kitchen alive and it wouldn’t even be from Joe’s less than stellar cooking. But Ryan leaned forward instead, leaned up against Joe’s back and slipped the knife into the sink. 

Joe turned. Ryan didn’t step back and Joe had absolutely nowhere to go, nowhere to look except into Ryan’s flat blue eyes. _That_ was his secret, the mystery beneath the veneer of Ryan’s charm, and it was thrilling all the way down to Joe’s toes to know it at last. Ryan was just like him, or at least close enough that the difference didn’t matter. 

Joe kissed him. There was nothing else to do so he pulled him in and he kissed him and Ryan’s hands went into Joe’s hair, tugged there as he kissed him back. It had been a very long time since Joe had known anyone so like himself and frankly it had been longer since he’d kissed another man. The two things together were quite the heady mix.

“It took you long enough,” Ryan said once they’d surfaced for air, the two of them still pressed close together, Ryan’s hands on Joe’s shoulders, thumbs brushing against his neck above his shirt collar. 

“I didn’t realise it was a competition,” Joe replied, with his arms looped around Ryan’s slim waist. 

But it seemed Ryan thought the deep, dark little secret he was keeping from the world was an attraction to men, an attraction to Joe. Joe could see around that, see beyond it, see what Ryan was hiding from himself, the secret he couldn’t even come close to acknowledging. 

He’d just have to show Ryan what _he_ saw, Joe thought. Then he’d understand.

\---

He eased him into it gradually. 

Joe had always liked to talk about Poe but usually his audience was a room full of nubile young women and impressionable young men all very much willing to take Joe Carroll’s word as gospel, or the occasional conference with his peers in the field of literature. Speaking about it to Ryan was something different, something strangely intimate and personal as they drank coffee together in Joe’s office or ate dinner out or ate dinner in, sitting in Joe’s living room before they’d pretend to be drunk enough that touching each other, the way to which they were quickly becoming accustomed, was perfectly sensible. Speaking about it to Ryan was like the best kind of intellectual foreplay because as much as Joe hated to be questioned and loved to be right, it was a strangely different affair where Ryan was concerned. Ryan challenged him in a way no one else had even thought to try in years. 

They debated over glasses of Joe’s good whisky until Ryan had developed a taste for it - mercifully, Joe thought, because cheap vodka had never been his choice of tipple. They debated over glasses of whisky and then Ryan would put their glasses down or Joe would and they’d lean in closer on the stiff leather sofa, Joe’s hand slipping to the back of Ryan’s neck, Ryan taking handfuls of Joe’s shirt; Ryan’s mouth would meet his and dip down to the prickly side of his neck and it was ludicrous when Joe thought about it, Ryan untucking Joe’s shirt, plucking open the buttons, Joe’s hands going in under Ryan’s t-shirt till he’d pull it away and off over his head. All they’d do was kiss, which was the ludicrous part of it when their pasts were taken into account, the promiscuity Ryan described when he talked about how drunk he’d been sometimes and Joe’s history of bedding co-eds. Joe’s fingers would skirt Ryan’s collarbones while he thought about his subclavian artery; Ryan’s teeth grazed Joe’s ear and though it all stayed firmly above the belt, there was a hint of something else to it. Joe was certain Ryan felt it too. It really couldn’t have just been him.

And then, one night, just like that, books left strewn all over Joe’s desk because he’d been desperate to prove a point and he’d realised a fraction too late that Ryan had just been shining him on with barely concealed amusement, Ryan caught Joe’s wrist as Joe turned to leave him in the guest room. And Ryan said, “I’m sick of sleeping in here, Joe.” 

“Then what do you suggest?” Joe asked, amused, perhaps, but piqued with it. “I’m not driving you home. I’m especially not driving you home after _that_ fiasco. I might never trust you again.”

“I think I oughtta sleep with you,” Ryan said, and his hand was still there around Joe’s wrist. His grip tightened, not enough to hurt but enough to make him take more immediate notice and Joe looked at him, closely, seriously. He let his smile fade. 

“Well, I’d hate to disappoint you,” Joe said in the end, and then he led the way to his bedroom though Ryan obviously already knew the way. 

They weren’t even close to as drunk as Joe would have thought they’d have needed to be, or perhaps he was just projecting his own issues with the situation at hand onto Ryan, he’s thought since then. It wasn’t that Joe didn’t know what he was doing because he did, he understood the mechanics of taking off Ryan’s t-shirt, of unbuckling his belt, but there were moments as Ryan unbuttoned Joe’s shirt, as Ryan went down on one knee to untie Joe’s shoes, as Ryan chuckled under his breath and nudged Joe’s cock with his nose as if that were in some way sane, when Joe wondered just what on earth he thought he was doing. Ryan let him push him down on the bed, let him settle over him pushed up on his hands; Ryan wasn’t really laughing at him per se, just at the situation as Joe nudged Ryan’s thighs apart and then knelt up between them. 

“You look nervous,” Ryan said, leaning up on his elbows. He raised his brows, a half-mischievous smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Fuck, Joe, don’t tell me you’ve never done this before.”

“Let’s just say that it’s been some time since boarding school,” Joe replied, with a wry smile of his own. Then he ran the back of his hand over the underside of Ryan’s cock and wiped the smiles from both their faces. 

They didn’t actually do it that night, not all the way, not at first. They sprawled in Joe’s bed together, admittedly rather large for one man though he supposed that he’d had company often enough over the years to justify the size, their hands on each other, Ryan’s erection brushing against Joe’s thigh and Joe’s fingertips tracing the curve of Ryan’s arse until they finally wrapped their hands around one another and did something about that. 

It was the morning after that things went further, when they woke up together with Joe’s weekday alarm and when Ryan groaned Joe realised he was surprised Ryan was still there with him. Fifteen minutes later, Joe was inside him, breathless and flushed, Ryan’s hands grasping at his biceps almost hard enough to bruise; Joe came with a shout that he muffled against Ryan’s shoulder and finished Ryan off in unsteady jerks while he was still inside him. Perhaps it wasn’t the best sex he’d ever had - it was a fraction too rushed for that, Joe knew he desperately required a shower after the previous evening’s shenanigans and they were both still stiff from sleep - but he couldn’t say he wasn’t eager for more. It was worth being late for work with no time to shave and the knowing looks that his students gave him. It was worth it when Ryan came to his office as usual in the afternoon and they brought each other off fully clothed pushed up against the back of Joe’s office door. Joe whispered every filthy thing he could think of and Ryan laughed and came up with a few surprisingly good ones of his own.

They spent at least two nights a week there after that, in Joe’s bed, together. Joe learned the angles of Ryan’s body quickly, learned where he liked to be touched and how, learned he himself didn’t mind how it felt when they stroked each other to orgasm in the wee small hours, when Ryan shifted over on top of him and they rubbed together until they’d made a terrible, unsightly mess of his rather expensive sheets. He enjoyed the early morning wake-up calls, the late nights, bare skin and Ryan’s easy smiles or one chilly Sunday night when the electricity unceremoniously expired and they spent the night in bed together, Ryan’s fingers teasing between Joe’s cheeks until his face was flushed and his cock was hard and he finally just went up on his knees; Ryan pushed into him that first time just like that, Joe’s hands on the headboard, Ryan’s hands at Joe’s hips, Ryan’s chest up against Joe’s back and the thick down comforter wrapped around the two of them like a particularly pornographic cocoon. They’d been warm that night, at least.

He didn’t even mind the rumours when they inevitably began to circulate, people wondering aloud when they thought he couldn’t hear them if Dr Carroll was screwing around with that older guy from Psychology. He hadn’t as much as batted a solitary eyelash in a pretty girl’s direction in months by that time, much to his own surprise and the girls’ disdain, so he couldn’t very well deny it. He sat down with the head of his department and told her he was seeing Ryan Hardy. He suspected she was just relieved that the rumours about his female students had finally died down. 

Still, in the end, he couldn’t work out exactly how to broach the _real_ subject. He couldn’t very well launch into a monologue on art and beauty and death and the aesthetics of romantic literature only to segue into an accounting of all the bloody murders he’d committed over the years because, to be frank, not only was he quite unsure what Ryan would say to that but the whole notion was entirely too crass. And so all he could do was ease him into it, day by day, week by week, month by month until Ryan was essentially living there with him. Joe hadn’t been particularly fond of roommates even in his boarding school days, but he supposed _roommate_ didn’t carry quite the correct connotation. It was difficult to say what they were. It was difficult to say exactly how they’d found themselves where they were. 

Ryan had clothes in Joe’s dresser drawers by then. Ryan had food in Joe’s fridge. Ryan had a toothbrush and a razor and an array of mystifying hair products all sitting there in Joe’s bathroom. His car was parked in Joe’s driveway more often than not and his running shoes were semi-perpetually stationed by the door. 

“You _could_ just move in, you know,” Joe told him one evening, in the midst of separating out the dropped and mixed-up printouts of Joe’s latest journal article from the third chapter of Ryan’s dissertation. They’d used the same font and the same spacing and the same page numbering and it was driving him to distraction discerning to which pile each page belonged by skim-reading snatches of content. Not only that but the number of paper cuts he’d suffered over the past fifteen minutes was truly obscene.

“You serious?” Ryan asked, ceasing his own paper-sifting with a frown. 

“Ryan, ask yourself when you last went home and then ask me again if I’m serious,” Joe said. And so Ryan moved in. 

And then, one night, Joe woke with a gun to his head. He’d almost expected it to be Ryan at the opposite end of the barrel but Ryan woke soon after that, still beside him in bed, and from the look on his face Joe could see quite clearly that he knew the gunman. From one of his old cases, Joe could only surmise, and he might have even been concerned with the situation at hand had Ryan not had a very familiar look there in his eyes. Joe, once dragged out of bed with the gunman’s arm around his neck, stamped down hard on the flimsily-shod foot behind him and Ryan fairly launched himself across the room with a chewed-ended ballpoint pen in his hand that went in first through the unfortunate assailant’s eye and then up under his chin. He dropped to the floor. Ryan was bloody all down his formerly white undershirt and breathing hard, practically shaking but it wasn’t from shock or some kind of disgust. There was something else there, something Joe knew quite well, something Ryan had clearly worked quite hard to deny.

“Well, that was certainly one of my less pleasant wake-up calls,” Joe said as he stepped neatly over the bleeding man who was apparently not quite completely departed from the land of the living. “We should have the alarms checked. Or maybe we should get a dog. I’ve always liked Alsatians.”

Ryan just glanced up at him then from the man on the floor and Joe looked directly back at him. _This_ was the time. It might never come again.

“You’re pretty calm for somebody who just saw me stab a guy with a pen,” Ryan said. 

Joe felt his lips quirk as he tried very hard not to smile. “How many men have you killed, Ryan?”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“How many?” 

“That’s not--”

“How _many_?”

Ryan paused, then he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, muscles working visibly in his jaw as he clenched it hard again after speaking. 

“Oh, I think you know,” Joe replied. “I think you remember all of them. And I think you remember them all quite vividly.”

“How would you--”

“I think you think about killing me sometimes, too. You ask yourself how you’d do it, I suppose.”

Ryan’s eyes widened just a fraction. Then Joe stopped smiling and, calmly, carefully and quite deliberately, he stepped on the dying man’s throat. He was dead in moments after that. 

“You killed him.”

“I’d say it was more of a joint effort,” Joe said, reaching for a worn t-shirt from the laundry basket to wipe off his bare, bloodied foot as Ryan stared at him. “Wouldn’t you?”

“You’ve done this before.”

Joe finally stopped hopping around on one foot like a total lunatic and tossed the t-shirt down on the dead man’s chest. 

“So have you,” he said. 

“I was with the FBI.”

“And was it _always_ business, Ryan?”

And that was when he knew, from the shattered look on Ryan’s face. It had _never_ been about business, not really; perhaps he’d told himself that it was and perhaps he’d even believed it, talked himself into the idea late at night when he looked back and remembered the things he’d done. He’d tell himself he’d taken lives to save lives, Joe expects, and obviously the whole affair was complicated by the fact that Ryan’s actions likely _had_ had the outcome of saving lives; Joe still thinks he really shouldn’t have had to explain the difference between correlation and causation to a scientist, but there it was. 

Ryan knew. 

\---

They were questioned, of course, after Ryan phoned the police, but it wasn’t the police that did the questioning. The FBI came in instead: a rather attractive female agent who Ryan seemed to know arrived in the morning and asked awkward questions about their private life that Ryan not-quite-laughed off with a grimace Joe had previously only seen in glimpses. That expression seemed to belong to his old life, with car chases worthy of Steve McQueen and an FBI ID bearing what was likely a very sombre photograph of a very sombre Special Agent Ryan Hardy. Joe recalls wishing idly that he’d known that man. He wondered then as he still wonders now what their lives would have been like. He supposes it’s for the best that they didn’t find out.

And then, in the early afternoon Ryan’s niece was there. It wasn’t quite the meeting Joe would have planned had he had the opportunity.

“You’ve been living with a guy for _months_ and you didn’t tell me?” she said once she’d marched forthwith into the police station, which hardly seemed like the most pertinent question at hand. 

“I thought you might--”

“Freak?” She sighed dramatically. “Jeez, Ryan, you know me better than that.” And then she turned and offered her hand and introduced herself to Joe as “Max Hardy, this insensitive jerk’s niece.” He decided he quite liked her. 

The evidence from the house and from their assailant’s motel room all said that a recently released convicted killer had absconded from parole to stalk Ryan Hardy who had, it seemed, been instrumental in his conviction once upon a time. Everything said that Ryan and Joe had killed that man in self-defence, fearing for their lives, and then called the police to report it. It was true, or at least it was mostly true, and the omissions didn’t seem particularly important. And then they left the police station and they checked into a hotel for the evening, two floors up from Ryan’s niece, because as much as the entire affair seemed clear-cut to all concerned, their house was still for the moment a crime scene. The bedroom floor would still be bloody, though Joe supposed he did have some experience in dealing with that. Frankly, he’d almost been tempted to dispose of the body himself and to hell with the phone call to the police, but Ryan was still attempting to do things by the book, albeit a relatively feeble attempt.

Ryan closed the door behind them and he rested his forehead down against it while Joe settled himself on the edge of the end of the bed. The room wasn’t bad, he supposed; he’d seen worse all around the world, at conferences here and there.

“How many?” Ryan asked. His tone was surprisingly even, under the circumstances, though he was still facing the door, still resting his head against it. 

“How many _what_ , Ryan?” Joe replied, feigning ignorance very, very poorly. Of course, he wasn’t exactly trying terribly hard, which might have explained that.

“You know what.”

“Of course I do, I’m not a complete incompetent.” Joe huffed out a sigh with a vaguely amused smile and crossed his arms over his chest. “Perhaps I’d just like you to ask the question properly. Do it right, Ryan, come on. And why don’t you at least _try_ to look at me while you do it.”

So Ryan turned and leaned back against the door and he rubbed one hand over his face, down his neck, over the bump of the pacemaker at his chest as he looked at him across the room. “How many people have you killed, Joe?” he asked, tightly. 

“Oh, that’s _much_ better,” Joe said. “Don’t you think that’s better?”

Ryan crossed his arms, looking distinctly less than impressed. “How many?”

“Including our friend last night, though I really do think that should count half for me and half for you…” Joe made a show of counting up to ten rather slowly on his fingers. “Thirty-four, all told.”

“I should turn you in.”

“Perhaps you should.” Joe smiled. “But you won’t.”

“I won’t?”

Joe rose from the bed, brushing down the shirt he’d been permitted to take from the house when they’d been ushered away by the police; they’d packed light bags later on, under an officer’s watchful gaze. 

“No, you won’t.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Virginia has the death penalty.” He went closer; Ryan didn’t move. “I think you’d miss me.” He rested both hands against the door at either side of Ryan’s shoulders, still looking him straight in the eye. “Besides, you want to watch me do it.”

Joe’s still not sure exactly which part of what he said affected Ryan the way it did, whether it was the notion of Joe’s guilt that he wasn’t denying at all or of the execution that would follow were he ever apprehended, or perhaps the sudden realisation that yes, actually, he _did_ want to watch Joe kill. Perhaps he wanted to join in. Perhaps he wanted Joe to watch _him_. Still, whatever it was, it made Ryan push him away, push him backwards; it made Ryan shove him hard in the chest and follow through with a swift right to his jaw that knocked him down sprawling with a sharp burst of pain straight through his head and neck and then Ryan was on him, straddling his thighs and shaking him hard by the shoulders, making his head bounce against the surprisingly spongy hotel carpeting. Joe let him do it for a moment, not sure if he let him due to the shock of the moment or because it was at least an authentic reaction, Ryan without all of his usual barriers, Ryan with the layers peeled back. But then he reached up and he took a handful of Ryan’s shirt and a handful of his hair and he tugged him down hard, rolled, settled himself astride Ryan’s thighs, leaning down, Ryan’s hands caught up above his head. He leaned there, Ryan’s wrists under one of his hands, and slipped the other palm to Ryan’s throat. He pressed down. 

“Are you saying this changes things?” Joe asked, and he could see Ryan _wanted_ to say that it did. He wanted to say yes, the old agent in him wanted to hit him and knock him out and neutralise the threat, call his old friends in the FBI and tell them he’d made a terrible mistake because the man he was living with had apparently turned out to be a serial killer just like the ones he’d tracked down and put in jail before his retirement. Joe watched him set his jaw, felt him swallow under the palm at his neck, felt him flex his wrists against the palm pressing his hands to the floor. “You could still turn me in, you know.” He leaned down heavy against Ryan’s throat. “Or we could end this now.”

Then, in a flash, in an instant, Ryan’s expression changed. It darkened. It cleared. 

“No,” Ryan said. “It doesn’t change anything at all.”

He meant it. But Joe knows it changed everything.

\---

It’s been nine years now since they met. 

The first time, Joe chose the victim carefully. He still recalls how much effort went into it, how much time he spent finding the right one, the _perfect_ one, how it took week upon interminable week and every night when they left work together, Joe driving the car or maybe Ryan would, maybe over dinner, maybe when they went to bed at night, Ryan would look at him as if all he wanted to ask was _is tonight the night?_ He wanted it and he was terrified of it. Joe needed to show him there was nothing for him to be scared of. He needed him to see that for them, nothing was forbidden. But, for week upon week upon week, tonight was not the night. 

And then it was, five weeks very nearly to the day after their little midnight mishap and subsequent interrogation. Joe didn’t tell him where they were going or why when they left the house after dinner and he supposed on some level he didn’t have to because even if they hadn’t spoken about it at all, because they’d continued to speak of everything but, Ryan knew what was going to happen. They went back to campus, parked out of the way and out of sight, dodged the poorly-placed cameras and waited. Three girls went by, two jogging side by side, the other alone a few minutes later, a few minutes past 11pm, and Ryan looked at him; Joe shook his head because no, she wasn’t the one, and they waited there together, dressed in black like a tragic pseudo-ninja film on late-night cable. But it wasn’t until another male, early twenties, athletic and sandy-haired and quick, darted out and pulled the girl into the nearest alley that the two of them moved. 

Ryan handled it well, standing back to watch from the relative shadows there in the alley as the girl sobbed out a thank you and ran, unharmed; he watched as Joe indulged his other passion, the one that didn’t often involve dark romanticism. And then, later, Joe perched on the edge of the bathtub under the harsh bathroom lighting and talked about a throwaway guest lecture he was due to give on Lovecraft while Ryan threw up, kneeling there on the bathroom floor in his bloodied black murder clothes. Joe gave him a scotch to wash the taste out of his mouth once they’d both showered away the blood and they went to bed after that, Ryan nuzzling the back of Joe’s neck in the dark under the sheets. It was a good first step, Joe thought, and Joe thinks. Ryan didn’t run. Ryan _hasn’t_ run.

The second time, Joe put the knife in Ryan’s gloved hands and closed his fingers around the hilt. Joe watched him do it and then they left together, Ryan quiet in the car but once they were home it was all pushing and pulling until they were naked together under the shower and then naked together in bed and Joe wanted it just as much as Ryan did, or the other way around. Ryan rode him, hard and fast, Joe’s hands at his hips digging crescents into his skin with his fingernails. 

The third time, Ryan already had the knife in his hand, ready, his expression calm and dark. Joe hung back and watched him rescue yet another girl and then do something else with the would-be attacker, Ryan’s gaze flickering up to meet Joe’s the second the knife was in. Ryan wasn’t hiding anymore and so the fourth time, they did it together, Ryan’s hand tight over Joe’s as they pushed the knife in. 

The fifth time, they took the knife away with them and Ryan held it to Joe’s throat in bed after, the blade rasping against his stubble as Ryan pushed inside him. Neither of them lasted long, Joe recalls. They were still bloody. They had to burn the sheets as well as their clothes.

They moved to New York a little over a year after that. Ryan went back to the FBI once he had his PhD at their request and Joe moved with him because why wouldn’t he, got a job at Columbia and they moved into the apartment it seemed Ryan had never sold until they bought a fixer-upper of a brownstone that was closer to Joe’s office than to Ryan’s. They spent the summer fooling themselves that they could figure out the renovations themselves but Joe has never had much of an affinity for power tools or getting his hands dirty in that particular manner and Ryan was, it turned out, learning his trade entirely from _Plumbing For Dummies_. That went some way to explaining the fountain that the bath became and the sputtering, spluttering moment wherein Joe was unceremoniously soaked through to the skin in his dusty jeans and paint-stained t-shirt. Joe swore colourfully and Ryan laughed at him and had it been anyone else then matters could have taken a turn for the worse, but Joe just pulled him into the cold water fountain to be soaked alongside him. They kissed and they called a plumber and Joe remembers how while they waited, the water turned off at the mains, they peeled off each other’s clothes and dried each other off and Ryan went down on his knees like as if that were the fitting apology. 

They spent Thanksgiving in Ryan’s apartment, by then half-filled with Joe’s books; they invited Ryan’s sister and her family, Ryan’s niece and her new FBI boyfriend over for dinner on Christmas Eve. Ryan kissed him under the mistletoe in their appalling Christmas jumpers that seemed like a joke at the time but that Max still makes them bring out every year. They’re disgustingly happy, even wearing reindeer jumpers there in the brownstone now that it’s vastly more habitable, even sipping eggnog in front of _It’s a Wonderful Life_. They never did get that Alsatian but Ryan’s enough of a guard dog for both of them these days. He puts on a suit every morning with his badge and his gun and sometimes, just sometimes, he pops open the stud on the holster at his hip and rests his palm on the grip of his gun and Joe watches him do it. Sometimes he draws it. Sometimes, just sometimes, he aims it, right at the middle of Joe’s chest the way agents are taught to, centre mass, sometimes at his head and Ryan’s a very good shot so it’s perhaps not just for dramatic effect. And sometimes, just _sometimes_ , he pushes the muzzle right up under Joe’s chin, forces his head back and Joe lets him do it. Sometimes he even shuts up for a moment, too, though that’s not because Ryan could put a bullet in his head and Joe would be dead before he hit the ground. He’s never sure whether the safety is on or off but that’s not it, either. He just enjoys the look on Ryan’s face. 

Joe takes the subway to work every morning and Ryan drives a laughably gigantic Suburban from the Bureau’s motor pool and sometimes, when the traffic’s not too shocking and Joe’s stayed late in the office, Ryan swings by the long way after work and picks Joe up from campus. And sometimes when he does that, home is not their first stop. There are suspects the FBI can’t touch, but that doesn’t mean they’re untouchable, not at all.

As the clock on the bedside table clicks over to 11pm, Joe takes off his reading glasses and puts down the book that he hasn’t really been reading but Ryan knows that, of course. Ryan’s been watching him, lounging there on his side with his head propped up on one elbow. Ryan’s been watching him think nostalgic thoughts about spilled coffee and ruined jackets and the never-ending comedy that is their life together because it’s nothing if not ironic. All he wanted that very first day was to know Ryan’s dirty little secret; now here they are, murderers growing old together behind the sickly-sweet façade that is their daily life. The irony is that Joe likes what they have, coffees at the café down the block, jogging together in the morning as if shorts and trainers and sweating had ever been high in Joe’s priorities. Ryan runs hard now he’s drinking in moderation, under Joe’s watchful eye. Even now that they’re both north of fifty, Joe’s the fittest he’s been in his life because of that. 

And in the end he’s not even sure he minds that all his artful, artistic murder has been subverted into something else, into the shared vigilantism that might be the only thing that makes the predilection that they share even vaguely palatable to Ryan. He still gets off on Ryan getting off on it, doesn’t need to put on a show because Ryan’s all the audience he needs. The death of a beautiful woman may well be the most poetical topic in the world, but there’s poetry there in the way Ryan looks at him, too. Ryan understands him. Ryan doesn’t flinch away from who he is because he’s the same. These days, the smile reaches his eyes. At least it does where Joe’s concerned.

“You know, most people would find your stare disconcerting,” Joe says. 

Ryan shrugs. “You’re not most people, Joe,” he replies, stroking Joe’s ego just the way they both know he enjoys. And he leans over to give Joe a teasing goodnight kiss before he turns off the light. 

All he’d wanted that first day was to know Ryan’s secret and then go on with his life as it had been before they’d met, pretty girls and Poe and death and coffee and meetings and murder. He should be appalled, Joe thinks, as he lies there awake, as the back of Ryan’s hand brushes against his hip. He should be downright murderous and maybe one day he’ll dig out the pacemaker from Ryan’s chest with the tip of a knife or Ryan will press the muzzle of his gun up under Joe’s chin and pull the trigger. Maybe Ryan will turn him in and Joe will drag him down with him and that will be the end of it, death row and executions. 

But, for now, they have a life to live. They’ll do it together.


End file.
